ADDIE in the Workplace

Corporate Training in the Real World

The corporate world lives by project deadlines. You probably have several projects on your desk right now, and you're already anticipating others that are on their way to you. If you want to stay current, you have to keep moving forward and meeting deadlines. Intulogy's clients often have urgent training projects. Here are just a few real examples of projects from our clients:

• "Our new software system goes live in ninety days, and we need a training course to support its implementation."
• "We'll be hiring people in eight weeks, and we need to create a complete new-hire training course."
• "Senior leadership has launched a priority initiative that requires us to retrain people ASAP."
• "We just sold a new product to a client, and they want us to train their people in a month, but we don't have a training course."

In each of these examples, the client had a very important training project, yet the project's timeline was driven by a business need.

Applying the ADDIE Model

The ADDIE model describes an ideal-world methodology. It assumes that training specialists will have plenty of time to create a great training program. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. With an urgent training project, you have to balance quality and timeliness.

The ADDIE instructional design model represents a complete instructional design workflow. It has built-in planning activities, quality assurance checkpoints, and feedback cycles. Sometimes, it's not possible to delay the training project's go-live date. Then the question becomes, "What can we do in the time that we have?"

Balance Risks and Costs

Because the ADDIE model builds each subsequent step from previous steps, skipping one step can create ripple effects throughout the entire process. While it takes more time to properly plan and execute a training project, it will substantially reduce the risk and the cost of errors. Like every business decision, you have to weigh risks and make a choice. However, it's best to be informed and make an educated choice.

If you've got a training project with a tight timeline, Intulogy's training specialists can help you assess your options and the associated risks. With that information, you'll be able to make an informed decision.

In this section, Intulogy looks at the ADDIE instructional design model through a real-world corporate training perspective. While we can't cover every factor that might affect a training program's development, we've tried to present some of the common choices in each of the five ADDIE phases. We begin our exploration of ADDIE and the Workplace by looking at the Analysis phase.